Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546404
LOOKING SHARP A total of 26 crew members of Filipino descent worked on the film, and Mercado drew from his own memories to bring the setting and era to life. "The first day that I started on the movie, Januel came in with a stack of photo albums from his trips to the Philippines in the '90s when he was a kid," says Production Designer Ryan Carlson. "He just dropped them in my lap and said, 'Let's start here.'" The crew referenced these photos for details like the colors of the walls, decor, even the kinds of snacks people kept in their kitchens. Memories can be brought to life by the smallest of details, so they wanted to get every element right. For a sequence surrounding Raissa's celebratory barbecue, a sprawling family affair in honor of her acceptance to an American university, Story Artist Tiffany Ford leaned on memories of her own childhood parties with her family of Filipino immigrants. "It was just tables and tables of uncles and aunties and cousins, and everybody's eating and asking if you ate, telling you to get some food," she recalls fondly. For her part, Character Designer Shreya Devarkonda spent hours referencing photos of Filipino faces. The style of the film called for sharp, geometric character designs that felt edgy and modern, but she observed that Filipino features tend to be rounder and softer, so she contrasted the characters' faces with structured clothing lines and graphic, pointy hair. "I wanted to get the likeness right because we haven't really seen Filipino characters in animation before," she says. "I wanted to make them feel authentic." This required intricate problem-solving. Take Raissa, whose rig was incredibly heavy, containing more than 8,000 controls. "Between her glasses, long hair, wings, jacket controls, and countless other elements, she was a significant challenge to animate," says Head of Character Animation Sean Sexton. Because computer graphics wants geometry to flow and tends to make things round and smooth, animating something with multiple angles means that each individual angle must be built into the rig to avoid it losing its edge. This can add hours to an animator's job. Nofsinger and the character effects team worked together to find a solution. "They developed a tool that would create model references of where folds were on clothing and hair in various poses. Then they could style the folds on top of the animation," she explains. Linework was also essential in maintaining these sharp designs throughout animation. "For example, a jacket might have lines offset from the edges," says Nofsinger. Then, during moments of action, these lines move, appear, or disappear to emphasize the motion of the sharp edge. This let the characters maintain their geometry even with the big, exaggerated movements used in the film's comedic and adventure sequences. this page: (from top) References from the Philippines were used to design authentic set details; Designs illustrating both main and background characters. F E AT U R E 24 KEYFRAME